Apple Magic Trackpad 2 Review

For Apple, the name of the game over the past two years or so has been scalability, of a sort: bringing a similar computing experience to the Apple Watch’s speck of a screen, to the gargantuan 27-inch panel of the Apple iMac with 5K Retina Display, and to every Apple device in between.

A key part of this strategy is how consumers touch their devices. And with the company's latest revision of the Magic Trackpad, the Magic Trackpad 2, the folks in Cupertino have come a long way in desktop touch tech. This new-for-2015 stand-alone touch pad does way more than understanding multi-touch gestures and reversing the direction that a Web page scrolls, to match how it works on the iPhone. (Apple did that with 2010's original Magic Trackpad and OS X "Lion," what seems like eons ago.) With the Magic Trackpad 2, you can take advantage of Apple's new Force Touch, a haptic-feedback technology also available on the Apple iPhone 6s and in the latest MacBook Pro notebooks. It performs different functions based on how hard you press the surface of the pad.

Besides this interesting leap forward (which will be even more so, as more third-party app and program developers roll out deeper support for Force Touch), the Magic Trackpad 2 includes two more major changes from the original. The first change is a welcome one: a built-in rechargeable battery. You no longer have to reach for that pack of Duracells or your old nickel-metal AAs and charger when your Mac tells you the Magic Trackpad is running low on juice.

The second, though, is unfortunate: Apple has almost doubled the $69 price from the original Magic Trackpad. At $129, the Magic Trackpad 2 was just $70 less than what an Apple iPad Mini 2 was selling for at Walmart in early December 2015 when we wrote this. Granted, the iPad Mini 2 is a whole different animal and doesn’t support Force Touch. But still, it’s a whole, bona fide computer!

The Magic Trackpad 2 is near-impeccable hardware, but the value proposition is hard to swallow. If you’re already a Mac desktop user, should you pay twice as much to eliminate battery hassles and gain the ability to Force Touch? We spent a week using the Apple Magic Trackpad 2 as our primary pointing and clicking device. Read on to see what we thought.

Design & Features

Not that the original wasn’t slim and sleek, but the new Magic Trackpad 2 takes those two synonymous-with-Apple adjectives to a new level. That’s because using a built-in lithium-ion battery allowed designers to excise the circular battery chamber from the 2010 original, which gives the Trackpad 2 a significantly lower profile than its predecessor. It’s still wedge-shaped, though, tapering slightly from back to front...

Upon removing it from the box, the first thing noticeable about the Magic Trackpad 2 is that it appears not to click. Pressing it by itself, unattached to a Mac, is like trying to click a brick. Before you assume your Trackpad 2 is damaged and send it back to Apple for a refund, know this: The pad uses haptic feedback—i.e., internal electronics—to simulate a mechanical clicking action, so there’s no actual, physical movement of the surface. It’s only after turning it on and pairing it with your Mac that the Magic Trackpad 2 will respond physically and audibly to your clicks.

The second thing you notice is that this is a big touch surface. It’s 29 percent larger than the original, and it is positively gargantuan when compared to the built-in pad on a 13-inch MacBook Air...

Pairing it with a MacBook Air laptop was simple enough, but it did involve two steps. The included Lightning cable must be connected to the desktop or laptop and the Magic Trackpad 2 for the first use...

After the system recognizes the Magic Trackpad 2, you can stow away the cable or use it as a spare iPhone or iPad charger, because the Mac will automatically connect to the paired pad every time it’s turned on and within Bluetooth range. While this two-step process (which involves plugging in a wireless device!) sounds a tad un-Apple like, it is actually faster than using the Mac’s Bluetooth software to do the initial search for and pairing with the device. Making that initial physical connection sorts all of that out for you.

Compared to the MacBook Air’s built-in, non-Force Touch trackpad (which is already a pleasure to use, compared to most PC touch pads), it’s immediately apparent that the Magic Trackpad 2 is in a class of its own. For simple clicking and dragging, its 28 square inches of surface area mean that you’ll seldom run out of space to drag a window or dialog box from one corner of the screen to another, even if you start with your finger in the middle of the pad instead of at one edge. (A big rectangle, it measures 4.5 inches front to back by 6.25 inches across.)

Single- and double-clicking are positively luxurious experiences. The haptic technology triggers a subtle but solid clicking noise when you tap, and the physical feedback is soft and smooth. It's genuinely tough to believe you're not actually experiencing a pressed-down, physical click. Plus, no matter where you click on the giant surface, the feedback feels uniform. Using the built-in MacBook Air trackpad afterward felt a little like trying to dent a tin can with a fingertip.

If you’re used to tapping your touch pad to click (as opposed to making a physical click-down press), it gets even better. You can configure the haptic feedback to be silent, which means that you get the same luxurious feel with almost as little noise as a tap...

We say “almost” because turning on the "Silent clicking" option mutes, but does not eliminate, the clicking sounds.

In our week of using the Magic Trackpad 2 for multiple hours every day, the battery life dropped about 15 percent. That’s consistent with Apple’s claim that a full battery charge will power the Magic Trackpad 2 for at least a month. You'll need the Lightning cable for the recharge, which takes about 2 hours to reach 100 percent capacity.

Force Touch

When it comes to Force Touch, Mac OS X "El Capitan" and its built-in apps have more than 40 different uses for this new feedback experience. Most involve hovering the cursor over a word or other element on the screen, pushing with your finger until you hear (or feel) a first click, and then pushing harder for the louder second click. (If you have silent clicking turned on, you’ll recognize the second click by its increased stiffness compared to the first.) It’s nearly identical to the shutter operation on a point-and-shoot camera, in which you press the shutter button halfway down to focus, then all the way to take the shot.

The easiest Force Touch function to remember is "Look up," which involves force-clicking text to see more information from a variety of sources. Force-clicking on the word “Spectre,” for instance, will give you snapshots of a dictionary entry, a Wikipedia page, and showtimes for the 2015 James Bond film. Force-clicking a flight number conjures up a map of the flight route as well as origin, destination, and estimated arrival time. When we force-clicked a Delta flight from New York to Milan, however, the information was somewhat unhelpful, telling us the flight originated in Los Angeles and was going to “Somma Lombardo,” which we assume is where the Milan airport is located...

As the screenshot shows, a simple Google search (behind the "Look up" popup) gave more useful and detailed information.

For an in-depth look at all that Force Touch can do, check out this article on Force Touch at our sister site, PCMag.com, and keep in mind that more and more third-party developers are adding support for it. So the usefulness factor is sure to grow as time passes.

Conclusion

Apple says that a Bluetooth 4.0-equipped Mac running OS X 10.11 “El Capitan” or later is required to use the Magic Trackpad 2. That said, our test-unit Magic Trackpad 2 worked perfectly on an ancient, non-Bluetooth 4.0 MacBook from 2009. So, in addition to bringing force-clicking to modern Macs that don’t have it (the iMac, Mac Pro, Mac Mini and MacBook Air), the Magic Trackpad 2 might be able to breathe new life into an old Mac, as long as it can run El Capitan. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys the feel of using your Mac as much as much as its user-friendly operating system, then the Magic Trackpad 2 might be a worthwhile upgrade if you’re not ready to buy a new computer.

One thing worth noting: If you’re buying a new iMac or a Mac Pro, the Magic Trackpad 2 is a configurable item at time of purchase. (You can upgrade from the included Magic Mouse 2, the standard pointer, for an additional $50.) Also, know that Force Touch is not unique to the Magic Trackpad 2; it's also in some of the latest Apple laptops. If you want to give Force Touch a spin in one of these, the MacBook (2015) and 2015 MacBook Pro with Retina Display both come standard with Force Touch-enabled pads.

In other words, if you are satisfied with your computer’s current pointing device and aren’t planning to replace your entire Mac desktop, we suggest holding off on the Trackpad 2. The Magic Trackpad 2’s large premium for Force Touch and a few other nice-to-have features doesn’t add up unless you're flush with bucks, or have a particularly compelling reason to fiddle with Force Touch. (Say, you're a software developer employing it.)

The Magic Trackpad 2 is an excellent touch pad, to be sure. But as much as we hate to dote on the status-symbol properties of Apple products, this one illustrates the issue as well as any. As Contributing Editor Eric Grevstad noted in our review of the Apple MacBook (2015), “The new MacBook is Apple being Apple, for better and for worse.” We feel the same way about the Magic Trackpad 2. It's great hardware and will make undoubtedly make your fingers happy. But it won’t do your wallet any favors.